Chapter 39
Rhys — Past
I had nobody at Eldridge.
Nobody.
Not one person.
I was alone.
Not a single person on that campus who would have noticed if I didn't come out of my room for a week. Who would have texted back at two in the morning. Who would have sat with me in the silence of someone who is not okay and known, without being told, that I was not okay.
But it was an inevitable disaster of my own making.
I came to Eldridge with my walls already up — new place, new people, let me read the room before I give anyone anything real — and I was so careful, so controlled, so determined not to be vulnerable in a place that hadn't earned it yet that I built my own cage and locked myself inside it and handed Marcus the only key.
And then Marcus made his choice.
I had nothing. Nothing to catch me. Nothing to hold onto.
Nothing between me and the full weight of what was happening except the ice and the four walls of a dorm room and the sound of my own breathing in the dark.
Completely alone. Even in a locker room full of people.
And the cruelest part was the voice in my head that said this is your fault.
You hid yourself. You didn't let anyone in. You put all of it in one person and you knew, you knew somewhere underneath all of it, that it was too much weight for one person, who hadn't even admitted to himself what he was, to carry. Who hadn’t been with another man before.
You were stupid.
You were naive.
You loved someone who was never going to be able to love you back the way you needed and you did it anyway and now look.
Now look.
The armor didn't work.
He broke through it anyway.
And got me straight through the heart.
Left me bleeding out alone.
Fucking worthless.
I was in love for the first time and the person I loved had stood fifteen feet away and watched them write on my locker and said nothing. Had heard the jokes every single morning and said nothing. Had heard what happened in the shower and said nothing.
And I had nobody to tell. Nobody to fall apart to. Nobody that would care. Having to carry it alone in a room by myself every night and get up the next morning and carry it onto the ice and pretend it wasn't there.
The ice was the only place I could breathe.
On the ice I was just a hockey player and I was a good one and nothing else was allowed to exist. I poured everything into it — every humiliation, every sleepless night, every time I had to stand in that locker room and hear my name used as a punchline and keep my face completely still.
I took all of it and I compressed it into something that came out clean and fast and hard on the ice.
I became the best.
There was a night in June. It was late. Well past midnight. The campus outside my window was quiet — the dead silence of a place where everyone else is asleep and you are the only person in the world who is still awake and still feeling things and still trying to figure out how to get to tomorrow.
I'd been lying there for a long time.
Not thinking exactly. More like — drowning slowly under everything I couldn't stop feeling.
The exhaustion of pretending to be fine for months.
The weight of the locker room every single morning.
The way Marcus looked through me in the hallway now like I was someone he'd never met.
The shower. The marker. The silence of people choosing not to see what was happening right in front of them.
The way the blue light looked on his face when he said I love you.
The way his hands felt in my hair. The way he pushed me away so fast I stumbled.
I picked up my phone.
I scrolled through every contact I had. Every single one.
Looking for a name. Looking for someone I could call who would pick up and who I could say I'm not okay to without having to explain everything from the beginning, without having to fake being okay while I said it, without having to be anything other than exactly as broken as I actually was in that moment.
There was nobody. Because if I called my parents, or my brother, or my friends from home, I would have to explain everything that happened.
And I just couldn’t. Not yet. I’d rather drown in it alone than do that.
So, I put the phone down and laid in the dark and stared at the ceiling and thought about a lot of things. I thought about how tired I was.
The kind that doesn't go away with sleep.
The kind that comes from spending every single day bracing for impact.
From walking into rooms and feeling the shift.
From laughing at jokes that aren't funny and saying I'm fine to people who aren't even asking and being so relentlessly, exhaustingly alone that the loneliness stopped feeling like a temporary condition and started feeling like a permanent fact about me.
Like maybe this was just what I was.
Someone people could leave.
Someone people could look through.
Someone who wasn't worth the cost of standing up for.
Someone that you could throw away.
Someone that didn’t deserve to be loved.
Maybe Marcus was right to be afraid of me.
Maybe it was never real.
Maybe I built things up because I wanted it so badly.
Maybe they were right about me and I just couldn't see it.
Maybe the way I am is wrong.
I pressed my face into my pillow and I stayed there until I couldn't breathe and then I stayed a little longer. Then I turned over and stared at the ceiling until it got light.
Got up.
Went to practice.
Scored.
I filed the transfer paperwork shortly after. Sat at my desk on a Tuesday morning and filled out every field and hit submit and sat there afterward in the silence of a decision made.
No one asked why I was leaving. I didn't tell them anyway. I just put my key on the desk and walked out. Didn't look back.
I didn't feel better.
I didn't feel worse either.
I just drove to a new place and I put an ad out for a roommate.
Not because I needed one. Because I had learned what it was like to be alone and I was not going to pay that price again. I would rather have a stranger than have silence. I would rather have awkward and present than distant and empty.
My roommate's name was Blake. I walked in with my bags and he looked up from his textbook and said —
You made it. You good?
And I stood there in the doorway of a new room in a new school in the ruins of what the last year had made me and felt relief, somehow.
Getting there, I said.
He nodded like that was a perfectly complete answer.
Three days later he made me breakfast without being asked and slid the plate across the counter and went back to his reading like it was nothing. Like showing up for people was just something you did. Like he could feel everything I was feeling without having to put it into words.
I didn't tell Blake everything for months. Some of it I've never told anyone. It lives in me in a room I don't open.
But mostly I just focused on building myself.
The version of me that walks into every room like he owns it.
The version that makes everything a joke before anyone can make it something worse.
The version that is so loudly, visibly, unapologetically himself that nobody can use it as a weapon because I got there first. The version with the walls so high and so thick that nobody — nobody ever — gets the version Marcus got.
I came out immediately. Completely. Loudly.
Without apology. Because I had learned what hiding cost and I was never paying that again.
And when I got to Harlow Jamie Nash came at me from day one.
Hostile. Wound tight. Looking at me like I was a problem that had arrived without his permission, like my presence on his ice was a personal offense he hadn't forgiven yet.
Another captain.
Another closet.
Furious at me for existing the way closeted men are furious at the thing they want and can't have. And I looked at him and I thought —
I know exactly what this is. I know exactly how this ends.
So I kept every wall up. Pushed back twice as hard for every inch he took. Made everything a joke, kept the armor on, made it stronger this time. I told myself I was protecting myself.
But I was punishing him.
I know that now.
I took everything Marcus did and I handed Jamie the bill and I made him pay it every single day and called it survival.
But here's what I know about Jamie Nash that Marcus Hale never was.
The way he passed me the puck in that last minute when everything was on the line when he could have taken the shot himself, because he was so busy trying to fight whatever this is.
Marcus would never have passed me the puck. Marcus would have taken the shot and let me watch from the wing and then apologized for it.
The way Jamie forces himself to say the real thing, except the one thing he can’t, Marcus could never.
Jamie tries. It physically hurts him to be vulnerable and he’s so fucking weird about it, but he tries.
Whereas Marcus had the sweet tongue, where every lie flowed so easily, painted in such a pretty picture, wrapped up in a perfect bow.
Who knows what he actually felt, what he actually meant.
Jamie Nash is not Marcus Hale and I have wasted months treating him like he is and I don't know how to undo it. I don't know if the damage is already done or if there's still something left to salvage or if I even deserve to try after everything.
I just know I'm tired.
I'm so tired of being afraid of the wrong thing.
I'm tired of being the person who learned all the wrong lessons from the worst year of his life and built a whole identity around never being hurt that way again and then wondered why everything still hurt.
It still hurts.
I don't want to be alone anymore.
I don't want to be alone now.
But I’m not doing that again.
Not for anyone.
Not even for him.